A few years ago I somehow got on the
mailing list for the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, which is promoting
a network of Japanese-style bullet trains fanning out from Chicago to places
like Detroit, St. Louis, and the Twin Cities. This seemed like a railroad
buff's fantasy until
President Obama
included funding for it in the economic stimulus package he sent to Congress earlier this year. The latest blast from the MHSRA includes a link
to an article by economist Robert Samuelson, who thinks
the whole thing is a boondoggle. What's the story, Cecil? I'm all for
green technology, but the notion of spending billions to shave an hour or
two off the train trip to Cleveland seems goofy. Does high speed rail make
any sense?

 Bob Y., Evanston

Cecil replies:

Two questions we need to deal with here. The first is whether what currently
passes for high speed rail in the U.S.  which really isn't all that fast 
makes any sense. We'll get to that in a minute. The more interesting subject
is whether truly fast trains, the kind seen in Japan or Europe, would work
in this country, and in our region in particular. The Midwest High Speed
Rail Association, for example, has proposed a
220 MPH line that would take you from Chicago to St. Louis in just two
hours. Here's the best spin I can put on the idea: it's not completely
crazy. That doesn't mean it's entirely rational. I'm not convinced genuinely high
speed rail would be worth the investment anywhere in the midwest, but if I had to pick one corridor where
it seemed even remotely plausible, Chicago
to St. Louis wouldn't be it.

Before we get into that, let's indulge in that railroad buff's dream for a moment.

If you're a
Chicagoan, you have to love high speed rail, even if you could care less
about trains. With its central location, dense existing rail network, and
dominant position in the regional economy, Chicago is at the heart of every
plan I've seen for midwestern high speed rail (the map above shows a typical
scheme; the Federal Railroad Administration has a
similar
one). The web of lines radiating
away in all directions looks like a giant CTA map. It's easy to see
high speed rail in just that light, as the basis for a sort of
super-Chicago, a metacity with its tentacles spread out over eight states.

The system's backers put the issue more diplomatically, but clearly they've had
similar thoughts. On a Web page entitled "Reinventing
the Midwest Economy," the Midwest High Speed Rail Association offers
this vision:

[T]he Midwestern economy is failing to achieve its potential. Our cities and
towns are too far apart to function together as an efficient economic unit.
Drive times are too long and airfares are too high.
Only high speed trains can draw our cities into commuting distance,
transforming the entire Midwest into a virtual metropolis with more dynamic
cities and rural towns, with quick connections to worldwide markets.

The midwest isn't the only part of the country proposed for high speed rail. Regional networks have been touted
throughout the U.S. Last summer states submitted nearly 300 applications for their
share of high speed rail funding. (The stimulus bill appropriated $8
billion, and Congress is currently considering whether to add at least $1.2 billion
more.) The Federal
Railroad Administration is expected to award grants this winter.

Few of the lines currently proposed, and none in the midwest, would be
considered high speed by world standards. The most ambitious project in
Illinois involves upgrading tracks from Chicago to St. Louis to allow trains
at operate at up to
110 miles per hour, up from the current top speed of 79 MPH.
For comparison, Japan's
Shinkansen trains run at speeds up to 186 MPH.

The Chicago-St. Louis scheme has its points. It's mostly within one state, simplifying
matters politically, and at $2 billion it's relatively cheap.

But it's no game-changer. It would reduce rail travel time between the two
cities from 5½ to 4 hours, which hardly puts St. Louis within commuting
distance of Chicago. Here I agree with Rick Harnish, executive director of
the Midwest High Speed Rail Association: rail service would have to be much
faster to truly transform the midwestern economy. I'm dubious that even 220
MPH trains would fuse Chicago and St. Louis into a virtual metropolis;
Milwaukee, only 1½ hours away via
Amtrak now, is hardly
a Chicago suburb. Still, would slicing rail travel time by close to
two-thirds fundamentally change the way Chicago and St. Louis interact? I
concede it probably would.

The question is whether the steep investment needed to achieve that
transformation can be justified economically. Many think the whole notion of
high speed rail in the U.S. is absurd. As you'd expect, the concept has been
harshly criticized by conservatives such as
Randal O'Toole
of the Cato Institute. But high speed rail has also been attacked by some
whose ideological bent is less conspicuous, most prominently Robert
Samuelson. His reasons for opposing it are familiar to anyone
who's followed this debate in the past:
unlike Japan and Europe, the U.S. is too thinly settled to support an
expensive passenger rail system. Given the country's vast distances, air
travel is the only practical means of long-distance mass transportation.

Whether the U.S. should invest in high speed trains at all we
can debate some other time. The issue before us now is whether it makes any
sense here. A recent report from the
Brookings Institution,
Expect Delays: An Analysis of Air Travel Trends in the United States,
suggests that at best just one high speed rail route in the midwest is worth
a serious
look.

Mind you, the report doesn't say that in so many words. On the contrary,
although it's nominally about the problems of air travel, one of its goals clearly is to build a case for high speed rail. The starting point
for that discussion is an analysis of the most heavily traveled air
corridors, on the theory that the best places for new rail investment
are routes where the planes are already full.
Here's an abridged version of the "Top 100 Corridors" for air passenger traffic as
computed by Brookings:

Rank

City #1

City #2

Distance
(miles)

Psngrs/Yr
(millions)

10-Yr Chg
(%)

1

Miami

New York

1,067

8.7

30

2

Los Angeles

San Francisco

347

6.3

18

3

Atlanta

Miami

574

5.0

10

4

Chicago

New York

733

4.7

4

5

Atlanta

New York

768

4.5

14

6

Los Angeles

New York

2,458

4.3

14

7

New York

Orlando

955

4.0

39

8

New York

London

3,468

3.8

1

9

Las Vegas

Los Angeles

229

3.7

16

10

Los Angeles

Phoenix

358

3.4

10

11

Chicago

Los Angeles

1,739

3.3

4

21

Chicago

Denver

892

2.5

4

24

Chicago

Washington

593

2.4

15

30

Atlanta

Chicago

598

2.2

16

31

Chicago

San Francisco

1,848

2.2

9

33

Chicago

Miami

1,174

2.1

3

35

Chicago

Las Vegas

1,518

2.1

49

36

Boston

Chicago

852

2.1

5

39

Chicago

Minneapolis-
St. Paul

342

2.0

10

49

Chicago

Philadelphia

673

1.9

55

52

Chicago

Phoenix

1,442

1.9

19

53

Chicago

Detroit

232

1.8

24

54

Chicago

Dallas-Ft. Worth

800

1.8

17

59

Detroit

New York

500

1.7

2

65

Chicago

Orlando

997

1.6

30

68

Chicago

St. Louis

255

1.6

22

78

Chicago

Kansas City

404

1.5

26

80

Chicago

Seattle

1,727

1.5

30

90

Chicago

Houston

931

1.4

9

94

Chicago

London

3,953

1.4

20

99

Minneapolis-
St. Paul

New York

1,019

1.3

46

S

everal things to notice:

The midwest accounts for 22 of the top 100 air traffic corridors in the U.S.
Of these, 20 have an endpoint in Chicago.

Only four routes, all originating in Chicago, have both endpoints in
the midwest. The four destinations, indicated in bold on the table, are
Detroit, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and St. Louis.
These are the region's most
likely high speed rail corridors.

Passenger traffic in all four corridors has declined over the past 10 years,
markedly so in three cases: Detroit, Kansas City, and St. Louis.

Here's another table from the Brookings report, this one listing the 10
busiest short-haul air corridors in the U.S., and thus the likeliest
candidates for high speed rail. (For longer cross-country routes, even the
fastest trains would be so much slower than airplanes that for most
travelers they're not a realistic alternative.)

Rank

City #1

City #2

Distance
(miles)

Psngrs/Yr
(millions)

2

Los Angeles

San Francisco

347

6.3

9

Las Vegas

Los Angeles

229

3.7

10

Los Angeles

Phoenix

358

3.4

13

Dallas-Ft. Worth

Houston

232

2.9

16

Boston

New York

185

2.7

25

New York

Washington

222

2.4

32

Los Angeles

San Jose

318

2.2

34

Dallas-Ft. Worth

San Antonio

248

2.1

39

Chicago

Minneapolis-
St. Paul

342

2.0

40

Austin

Dallas-Ft. Worth

190

2.0

Boston, New York and Washington already have
something approximating high speed rail service ( the
Acela Express,
capable of up to 150 MPH, although actual speeds are much less). That leaves eight projects. Four have endpoints in Los Angeles, three in
Dallas, and one in Chicago. The politicians undoubtedly would
want to distribute rail dollars equitably among regions, and Chicago has
plenty of clout, so if anyone around here were serious about high speed
rail, we could undoubtedly get a Chicago-Twin Cities route on the list.
Travel time would still be long  I'd guess close to three hours  so no one can seriously claim the two cities would be drawn within commuting
distance. Still, Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul are among the midwest's
few urban bright spots, and a high speed rail line connecting them
arguably makes some sense.

Except for the cost. Using
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's estimate of
$50 million a mile, we're talking $17 billion to connect just two major
cities plus a few smaller towns en route. It's hard to imagine political
support ever materializing for a project on that scale, much less a network
of 220 MPH lines connecting Chicago to places like St. Louis or Detroit,
where even air traffic is contracting.

Might a few 110 MPH lines might get built?
Sure, although the economic impact is likely to be modest. If it were left to me I'd invest
Chicago's share of the money in our scandalously underfunded local train
system  every indication is that metropolitan Chicago, and the city in
particular, will become increasingly dependent on rail for basic commuting. άber-Chicago as a modern Rome where all trains lead is a beautiful vision,
but it distracts us from more important things.